Published 23 Apr by Oleksandr Liubashevskyi

ICO Analysis: NuCypher

NuCypher is the decentralized key management system (KMS), or how they describe themselves “Privacy layer for distributed systems and decentralized applications. NuCypher KMS helps dApp developers secure their data on the blockchain with decentralized proxy re-encryption as a service”.

NuCypher aims to create a reliable decentralized network to remove weaknesses present in centralized systems. Unlike centralized KMS, it does not require trust in service providers and as a result, can make their KMS scalable (doesn't need a response from the main server) and secure (Proof of Stake consensus used).

Prototype:

They have more than a prototype, a production-ready cryptosystem pending 3rd party security audits (resource)

All of this partners will use NuCypher KMS in their purposes.This fact means:

An increase in income for stackers (more transactions -more significant rewards)

An increase in demand for Nu Tokens.

Increase in token price in long and short-term

There is INSIDE: agreement between Samsung and NuCypher: they will form an official partnership soon

Roadmap:

Nucypher didn't announce exact dates. Key milestones are:

launching KMS on testnet (In Icodrops interview Mike said that probably it will be early spring)

After launching testnet their partners will start writing and testing their applications.

Token sale.

KMS on mainnet will start immediately after a token sale - this is already working product with all main features.

Competitors:

In fact, this project is the unique encryption solution and it has the ability to displace centralized competitors in some areas of encryption, especially among those who suffer from a lack of scalability.

Close decentralized competitors are Enigma (Market cap: 135m USD) and Keep Network (ICO stage). But Enigma and Keep Network don't have product that can be used to work with private data. Also there is a considerable technology difference between competitors - Enigma and Keep advantage of the approach is that it allows more than proxy re-encryption but is very slow (impractical), and hard to scale.

Centralised approaches to KMS are typically expensive and technically difficult, their main purposes of existence usually is not security as such, but compliance with requirements. The governments often require all personal records to be encrypted.

Nowadays, Google Cloud KMS works well but require a high-degree of trust in the service provider, but im modern world it can be dangerous (remembering facebook).

Tokenomics:

There Utility and Stacke kind

To become a node holder and be rewarded for approving transactions you need to stake fixed amount of tokens (In ICO price - about 2000$).

In general, it will work in this way - Users will pay for re-encryption in Ethereum - as a result, the steackers will receive more ETH per one steak coin if the network is more popular.

Team planned to take about (this is not absolutely accurate) 20% of tokens (7% with locking period about half year) - and their main source of future income is stacking, so they are absolutely interested in popularization of their network

Team:

Adequate and sociable team, always answer in the telegram actively and communicate in a discord. They often participate in exhibitions, conferences and make hackathons. It consists mainly of technical specialists and businessmen from large companies in big data industry. Team has been working on the project for about 2 years.

MacLane Wilkison is a co-founder and CEO since 2014. Engineer-programmer, worked in Morgan Stanley in M&A department (technology, media and telecommunications)

is the technical director and co-founder of NuCypher since Mikhail Egorov March, 2015. He worked as a Python programmer in two Australian companies. He worked 1,5 years in LinkedIn as a senior software engineer.

John Bentleman (John Bantleman), an entrepreneur with extensive experience in managing software companies.

Tony Bishop (Tony Bishop), Vice President of Equinix, former head of the Data Processing Center at Morgan Stanley.

Verdict:

We are glad to put NuCypher 9 out of 10. During token sale you will buy already finished product and could take fair stake income. We expect both short-term and long-term growth from NuCypher because of a solid list of their partners and technology advantage. As far as we know, the hard cap will be about $25M. We did not find any serious dangers, no matter how hard we try. Probably, NuCypher is the best project that you can find on this market now.